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ADDRESS 



DELIVERED ON 






Columbus Day, October 21, 1892 



AT THE 



Library and Museum Building 
of the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 



BY 



DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., 

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCHiEOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



PHILADELPHIA, 

1892. 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED ON 



Columbus Day, October 21, 1892, 



AT THE 



Library and Museum Building 
of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 



BY 

DANIEL g5bRINT0N, A.M., M.D., LLD., 

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCH.«:OLOGY AND LINGUISTICS 

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. / 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY 

OF WASHINGTON, D. C. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



PHILADELPHIA, 
1892. 



:?53 



Mr. Provost, Ladies and Gentlemen: — 

In this epochal year, on this epochal day, we cele- 
brate an event unparalleled in the annals of the race. 
That event completed the knowledge of the Old, by 
discovery of a New World ; it dispersed the dark- 
ness of dogmatic philosophy by the clear light of 
investigation and exploration ; it revealed to man 
the fullness of his own nature by making him ac- 
quainted for the first time with all the varieties of his 
own species. 

Others will tell you the thrilling and pathetic tale 
of the greatness of that great and still misunder- 
stood and calumniated man, who went forth to 
search the lonely seas, derided by the learned, flouted- 
by the ignorant, but full of infinite courage and un- 
swerving faith, fixed in purpose "to sail beyond the 
sunset and the baths of all the western stars," until 
he should reach the lands unknown and shores un- 
trodden which his prophetic soul discerned. 

Let others tell of his reward, of the darkened cell 
where he sat with manacled limbs, of the insults 
heaped upon his children, of his neglected age, and 
of the anxieties that hovered around his dying couch. 
Of these, I say, let others speak, — those capable of 
sympathizing with a grand nature battered and 
broken by the storms of fate and the keener blasts 
of ingratitude and jealousy. 



I would call your attention to those strange mil- 
lions who, through the strong endeavor of this 
famed commander, were brought into relation with 
the rest of their kind, — isolated, unique example of 
a race of our common species, cut off time out of 
mind from all others, but preserving through those 
thousands of years the unalterable imprint of Human- 
ity. VVe know not whence they came, nor when. 
Far back in those gloomy years when the ice sheet 
covered the continent almost to the spot where now 
we stand, there seem to have been some men in this 
land batding with the elements for a hard subsistence. 
Many believe that their imperfect weapons, mere bits 
of broken stone, may yet be found in the gravels and 
moraines of the ancient glaciers. Perhaps from 
these descended that race which, with a surprising 
uniformity of physical and mental traits, extended, 
at the time of the discovery, from the shores of the 
Arctic Sea on the north to the bleak rocks of Cape 
Horn on the south. " Wherever you find its repre- 
sentatives, you see the same peculiar hair, color, 
eyes, and other physical signs of racial unity ; and 
wherever you trace their history, you find the same 
forms of religious and social life, the same lines of 
culture-development, and that same ineradicable love 
of liberty which seems to be inhaled with the air of 
this New World, and to become a part of the 
nature of men of whatever race who settle upon its 
soil, an inspiration and a faculty divine, ever urging 
them to wider horizons and a higher evolution. 

Yet alongside of all these differences, sundering 



them sharply from all other men whatsoever, we find 
such staggering similarities of thought, of story, of 
industrial product, that many a learned man to-day 
will tell you that they can be explained only by the 
theory that explorers earlier than Columbus, naviga- 
tors antedating the Norwegian mariners, had not 
merely touched the coasts, but had penetrated deep 
into the American continent, carrying with them the 
arts and the philosophies, the religions and the gov- 
ernments, of the Old World. They will point out to 
you, as did the learned Humboldt, that the calendar 
of the Aztecs is too close to that of the Thibetans to 
suppose it could have come from any other source ; 
or, as has been often advocated by names less known 
to fame, that the signs of early Christian influence, 
the marks of Buddhistic dogmas, the words of Aryan 
languages, the alphabet of Chinese scribes, the traces 
of Phenician culture, the fragments of Welsh dialects, 
the proofs of Japanese intercourse, are all too clear to 
permit of a doubt, but that from these sources the 
American Indian owed whatever of civilization he 
could boast of. 

The learned writers who have filled portly volumes 
in marshalino- such evidence have foraotten one 
fact, — that, first of all, the native American was a 
man, a man as we are men, with the same faculties 
and aspirations, with like aims and ambitions, working 
as our ancestors worked, endeavoring to carry out 
similar plans with very similar means, fighting the 
same foes, seeking the same allies, and consequently 
arriving at the same or similar results. These 



writers have thus lost to view the greatest lesson of 
all, that man, everywhere and at all times, separated 
by trackless seas, shut up apart ever since glacial 
ice froze the continents, dreaming of none others 
than he sees around him and influenced by none, 
develops in accordance with the laws of a common 
nature, proves himself kith and kin fo all other men, 
vindicates everywhere the words of that wise man 
who, nigh nineteen hundred years ago, startled 
the subtle and conceited sophists of Athens by 
declaring, — " God has made of one blood all nations 
of the earth." 

This is the lesson, and the last and highest lesson, 
which you will learn if you look around you in this 
building-. What is the use of all these stranQ-e and 
diverse objects ? Why bring together at much 
labor and expense these broken stones, these weap- 
ons of savages, these battered and nigh effaced 
inscriptions, these bones and hideous remnants of 
the buried dead,— why place them alongside of 
carved scimitars, of gay porcelain, of the dreams of 
beauty chiseled on glorious gems ? What means 
this fantastic conglomeration of disparate material ? 

I will tell you. Every object you see in these cases, 
every fragment, every bit of dirty stone as well as 
every gem, every torn scrap of mummy cloth as well 
as every gaudy vase from the famed potteries of the 
Orient, is a star — a star, shinincr throuoh the nio-ht of 
time, illumining to our view the path, — the long, the 
blind, the dreary, often the bloody path, — that man 



trod to reach these classic grounds and breathe this 
peaceful air which are around us here to-day. 

Is it not worth while to learn the paths our fathers 
trod, to hear of their struggles, to sympathize in their 
defeats, to share great joy at their victories ? Indeed 
it is. These fraorments around us tell of contests 
and crises which no history records ; they testify of 
heroes greater than Agamemnon, of whom no Homer 
has sung; they hint of tribes and nations who fought 
and fell, and of whom not even the name is inscribed 
on any tomb, but who marched breast forward, never 
doubting right would triumph and their deeds bear 
fruit in ages yet unborn. They were right ; and the 
lesson of this miscellaneous mass, of this farrago of 
stuff and lumber, of worn-out scraps and shards of 
pots and pans, if you will read it aright, is that in the 
endless chain of history.no link is useless, that from 
the dark days when man, a naked savage, struggled 
with weak powers against the elemental and mighty 
forces of nature, up to to-day, when he has made 
them his obedient servants, there are everywhere 
marks of a master hand, guiding his steps in the 
darkness, letting no life wholly go to waste, building 
every fragment into an edifice which shall become 
a temple, pursuing through all devious ways the 
design of some unseen Destgner, ever blending, 
guiding, developing, toward some future end which 
we can dimly descry but dare not define. 

This is the truth, — the elder truth, the sacred truth, 
— which this Museum teaches, which is the object of 
its construction, which it seeks by its thousands of 



8 

evidences to corroborate and to disseminate. It is 
an earnest and a living truth, which it behooves you 
to take home and Hve intimately with ; for remember 
this, that all you have in the present, all you enjoy, 
all you can offer those you love, is the product and 
the harvest of the past, of those ages of accumulating 
knowledge and skill you see here represented ; and 
remember this still more, that we are to future 
generations what these ancient people were to us, 
and that as we accept and delight in the extension 
of knowledge, as we cherish and honor the past and 
its lessons, as we love to gather the proofs of the 
noble deeds of our fathers, so we shall transmit to 
our children and our children's children, unto untold 
generations, the aspirations that are ennobling and 
the passions that are heroic. 













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